Infinite
by ArwenJaneLilyLyra
Summary: Associating with terrorists, they threaten, her own private sentencing. That's when they pull out a photograph of Arthur.
1. PART ONE

**SERIES:** Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient

 **STORY:** Infinite

 _A story about whistle-blowers and war-mongerers. A story about pyrite and cubic zirconia, about Dolos and Carnus._

 _A story about doing a bad thing for good reasons and doing a good things for bad reasons. (Sometimes, they are all the same thing.)_

Hullo all! It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Welcome to my series **Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient**. It's a bit sprawling, has a _lot_ of non-linear narrative chucked in and an abundance of slightly reality-bending spy stuff in it, too. I've rated it M for some pretty nasty themes, including instances of torture and sexual violence, although neither are too graphic in this story.

There is an Arthur/Eames pairing, but it's such a slow burn that the flame is barely alight in this one. You'll see it more in future stories, particularly Arthur and Eames' viewpoints, which will come later in the series. There is also a tiny bit of Arthur/Ariadne, but it's quite obviously not endgame.

I would love to know what you think, so do leave a little review!

Many thanks,

ArwenJaneLilyLyra x

(Cross-posted from Archive of our Own under **LittleRedCosette**.)

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 **PART ONE**

 **(the prisoner)**

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 _ **(between the indigo, pearl's mother)**_

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At the forefront of her mind is this: a frown soft enough to let in the sunlight of a hidden smile, glass buildings and clean sidewalks and a voice sounding young for the first time.

At the forefront of her mind on a lyrical loop of regret he says, _She was lovely_.

As Ariadne looks down at Arthur's lax figure through the one-way glass panel, sees him hooked up to a PASIV by one line and a saline drip by the other, she wonders darkly what she'll tell people about him.

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It begins on a Sunday in April. Easter has come and gone, leaving Paris in cherry rose bloom.

The Tuileries Garden is alight with golden green, tourists flock down the Champs-Élysées in camera clicking herds and in a tiny café in Menilmontant, Ariadne Sommerson is being followed.

At least, she thinks she's being followed.

She sits at a cautious angle in her seat at a corner table, her eyes scanning the faded yellow walls and thin, weary faces blinking into their breakfasts as the April morning creeps towards noon.

Her coffee has gone cold and the croissant she ordered is missing two bites at most, choked down and pulled apart by anxious fingers into crumbs on her plate.

There's a man sitting near the door, wrapped in cool lines of blue and grey and purple, a gentle face and a newspaper folded in his lap.

Hand hidden in the centre pocket of her hoodie, Ariadne types a text with a stiff thumb,

 _Caught a tail. Come to palais cafe asap._

She presses _Send_ with a violent jab and toys with her coffee cup in her free hand. The tight, ricocheting irritation in her chest which has been present for days grows as the man sitting across the room at the seat nearest the door lifts one leg to cross his ankle over his knee, flapping out his newspaper loudly.

Though it feels like an hour, it probably takes less than ten minutes for Jessie to arrive.

She lopes in with an easy grin for the waiter and an order of two coffees. As she slides into the seat opposite Ariadne, she snorts at her friend's meagre first attempt at breakfast.

"And just what do you think will happen now your heel-clutcher has seen me, too?" Jessie asks, her dark blue eyes glittering.

Her blonde hair is wet, pulled up in a bun with wisps falling about her round, clean face.

For as long as Ariadne has known her, Jessie Gordon has had the uncanny ability to always look like she's just woken up from a nap in faeryland. She's soft and warm and she looks like she belongs on a farm in rural France, carrying pails of milk and wearing muddy dungarees.

At least, Ariadne thinks so. Jessie heartily disagrees and has said as much on more than one occasion, chuckling with rolling, lemon-sharp disdain.

"I don't _know_ ," Ariadne says, eyes flicking around the room for the umpteenth time.

The tables are mostly unoccupied. The few other patrons are engrossed in conversations and newspapers.

There's a deep, sooty smell of old wood permeating the cafe. The grumbling of the outside world feels distant, locked away despite the sunshine leaking like melted butter through the room.

"Which one is it?" Jessie asks. "Monsieur Charcuterie at the bar?"

Her smile is radiant. Ariadne huffs.

"Monsieur Cravat near the door," she corrects her neighbour.

"Ahh," Jessie nods, conspiratorial and gleeful.

Her cheeks are pink and she blinks a lot as the waiter approaches with their coffees.

" _Mercy bucup!_ " she titters in her worst French accent.

For nearly four years they've been frequenting this cafe and every single time Jessie has without fail played the perfect tourist.

"Jess, I'm serious," Ariadne says.

"Aren't you always?" Jessie retorts, her smile dimming but never quite leaving her face. "Try to look like you're at least a tiny bit happy to see me, Saffron," she teases.

Ariadne pulls her lips into a grin. It's ill-fitting, almost painful.

"I am," she replies. "Thank you. Really."

Jessie just laughs and sips her coffee.

She's been covering Ariadne's back ever since the Canadian returned from LAX nearly three years ago, bringing with her a whole host of cloying, writhing nightmares.

It had been Jessie from the start, really, since their first year student roommate days, arguments over shampoo flavours and who ate the last of the bread. When Ariadne's plane had touched down in Paris, it had been Jessie holding a big placard at the Arrivals Gate, _SAFFRON_ in capital letters.

She had been the cold, damp flannel on a feverish brow and the warm body cocooning her restive sleep and the sympathetically vague excuses to professors and friends.

She'd been the open ear that Ariadne's secrets had fallen into and she hadn't flinched once.

"You need a boyfriend," Jessie says after a while, picking at a mosquito bite on her calf.

The cafe, quiet as it is, still bubbles with life. Outside, Paris is the same shuffling, strolling contentment it always is at eleven o'clock on a Sunday morning.

Ariadne groans, shifting to lean her chin into a cupped palm, elbow heavy on the table.

"You can borrow mine, if you like," Jessie offers, not for the first time. "Lord knows he's been no use to me lately."

"I'll pass," Ariadne replies with a sour leer.

Near the door, Monsieur Cravat folds his newspaper and asks the waiter for the bill.

"He offered to go down on me last night," Jessie continues, sounding thoroughly disgruntled. "Offered! _Oh honey, I thought as a little treat tonight, I'd do the dishes, and then the hoovering, and then perhaps I'll eat your pussy?_ "

"Jessamine!" Ariadne snips, pulling her gaze from the man near the door to glare at her friend.

"Oral sex isn't a chore on the list, Ariadne!" Jessie announces, a decibel shy of loudly.

"I didn't ask you to come to distract me, Jess."

" _He_ still has to ask if I _did_ come at all," Jessie grumbles. "And of course you did. You know full well I'd be about as useful as tits on a turtle if you were actually being followed."

"I _am_ being followed," Ariadne says sharply. "I asked you here because I didn't want to be stuck alone with him."

Jessie looks disbelieving as she sips her coffee.

Ariadne twists her lips and starts shredding her destroyed croissant even further.

" _And_ I wanted a distraction."

"Hmm," Jessie smirks victoriously. "So?"

"So?" Ariadne sighs.

"What do _you_ think about Max offering to go down on me?"

Ariadne shrugs.

"I think you should have said yes."

"How do you know I didn't?"

Finally, the smile Ariadne cracks feels a little more genuine.

"Because you wouldn't be complaining so much today if he had."

Jessie scrunches her nose and takes a handful of croissant from Ariadne's plate. She looks as if she's considering eating it, but instead she starts pulling it apart into her drained coffee cup.

"It would have been nice if he'd just _done_ it. You'd think after two years he'd have the guts to get messy in the bushes without asking for permission first. The only prude in all of France and I have to get stuck with him. I swear to God, he's more English than me."

Ariadne watches over her friend's shoulder as the stranger with the gentle face and the grey neckerchief pays his bill with a crisp twenty euro note.

He stands abruptly, not waiting for change. His natural stoop hides most of his face as he bows out of the cafe.

A thick, Gordian knot of anxiety that's been tied around Ariadne's stomach loosens.

"Your _tail_ gone?" Jessie asks coolly.

"Yup," Ariadne says. "Thanks."

"You can thank me with a daquiri. Tonight. No excuses."

Jessie waves over the waiter and asks for the bill with a clumsy _la dishon, please_ , sounding something closer to Italian this time.

She preens at Ariadne's disapproving glower.

"It's been _ages_ ," she says, holding the whine in her throat around the vowels. "I'm worried."

Guilt flares brief and electric in Ariadne's chest.

Her mouth twists around her apology.

Just the once, she returned to Paris a week earlier than expected, covered in bruises and shaking at the thought of going to sleep alone.

Jessie's hovering has only increased over time.

It was almost four months ago, now. She'd called Arthur two days later, but like the previous seven voice mails she'd left in the lead up to the job, her plea went unanswered.

The job was a clear bust and the extractor had emailed an apology before wiring three thousand Euros into her account.

She's turned down three jobs since.

" _Building Beneath_ ," Jessie says, picking up the second year architecture textbook Ariadne brought with her to the cafe and perusing with a slight sneer. "What are you doing with a kiddie book like this?"

"It was the first one I picked up off my shelf."

Jess laughs, bemused.

"And you left your flat why, exactly?"

"Monsieur _Cravat_ was sitting outside the building, Jess," Ariadne gripes. "He's been there before, too."

This time, Jessie doesn't respond.

Her eyes, sad emeralds in a face of freckled sunshine, crease at the edges with concern.

It's the same look she gave Ariadne four months ago as she rubbed aloe into her purpled skin and hummed _Chopin_ under her breath. It's the look that says _Stop_ louder than her lips will ever dare.

It's the look she gives when Ariadne mentions paradoxes and kicks and Limbo.

It's the look she used to give at the name Arthur, but Ariadne hasn't mentioned him since the last unreturned voicemail, four months ago.

He's become a ghost in her telephone. He's slipped out of her grasp like smoke and there's hollow fear in her chest to think of him.

They are sparing thoughts. They ooze blood and plasma and somnacin. They swell in her mind and throat like throbbing cobwebs.

"Thank you for coming," Ariadne says, meek and sincere.

There's a crease in Jessie's brow, still. Her hair is lightening as it dries, curling at her temples and nape into clouds of gold.

"I'm sorry I pulled you into all this."

Jessie raises her thick, caramel eyebrows.

"I walked into it."

She sounds almost affronted.

"Well, thanks."

Dropping the money for the coffees and croissant onto the table, Ariadne stands.

Jessie follows, still frowning.

She's taller than Ariadne, with limbs made for tennis and curves that she hides beneath shapeless dresses and jumpers.

It's only once they're out on the street, meandering up to their apartment block and casting furtive glances for followers that Jessie speaks again.

"I mean, I can't remember the last time I _offered_ him a blowjob."

Ariadne grins, briefly grabbing her friend's fingers to squeeze them fondly.

"I know," she says consolingly.

Their laughter is loud in the Sunday softness of the daylight. It filters up into the sky and rumbles beneath the sparse traffic.

On the other side of the street, a man follows.

His eyes are quick and his stride is long. The tap-scrape of his gait is light against the stones of the pavement.

He watches the two women as they stop at the greengrocer's and the florist's and the butcher's, one by one by one. He watches them scurry into their apartment block, the heavy door shutting behind them with a quiet snick.

.

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 _I thought you were being paranoid_ , Jessie will say later as she cleans the vomit from Ariadne's face and holds her hands to stop the trembling.

 _So did I_ , Ariadne will reply.

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 _ **(gold, a sun, for the fools to cherish)**_

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Spring blossoms, full speed ahead towards a scorching summer. Jessie and Max cook dinner and bicker over garlic-tomato ratios. The world continues to fizzle and turn.

Six days after the cafe and the undrunk coffee, Ariadne answers the phone as she lounges on the sofa, halfway through a marathon of films she should probably stop watching, now that she knows them by heart.

It's Yusuf, sounding breezy and faltering, though she won't realise that until later, until _after_.

She answers the phone and Yusuf crows in delight, like he's surprised she picked up.

(She'll wonder later if she wasn't supposed to, though by then it will be too late.)

" _I heard about this job and thought instantly of you,_ " he says proudly, all cheer and confidence.

Ariadne grins nervously into the phone.

"I'm sort of on a break right now, Yusuf," she says in a gentle apology.

Yusuf scoffs. The sound crackles through the ten thousand miles that separate them.

" _Dreams wait for nobody, Miss Ariadne,_ " he reminds her with a flourish of extra _r_ rolls.

Buried into the mountain of cushions bedecking her sofa, Ariadne wriggles into a comfier position and yawns.

"There will always be dreams," she retorts.

" _But Ariadne!_ " Yusuf cries, sounding close to despair. " _A labyrinth of suburbia followed by a theme park! Tell me you've never wanted to build your own scary funhouse._ "

"I've never wanted to build my own scary funhouse," Ariadne says, grinning.

" _You're lying,_ " Yusuf grumbles.

"Yes, I am," Ariadne confesses. "But I'm taking a break. Everyone wants to build their own scary funhouse, Yusuf. Ask someone else."

" _Nobody will build a scary funhouse like you, though,_ " he says with a dry laugh.

Nestled in her sofa with the TV muted and dusk spilling into the room through her window, Ariadne frowns.

"Whose is the job?" she asks.

The prickling in her spine that she thought was cold air from the window has spread out towards her extremities.

On the muted television screen, a silent Ava Gardner gesticulates wildly, glistening like starlight.

" _It's Eames',_ " Yusuf says. The breezy tone to his voice sounds all of a sudden a great deal cooler. There's a thin layer of ice coating his words, making them feel fragile. " _He needs you in Copenhagen by the twenty-sixth._ "

The sharp needle hidden in Yusuf's words almost misses Ariadne completely.

She stutters on several questions before the realisation strikes her.

"Copenhagen?" she says instead.

Ava Gardner has given up her tirade. Ariadne watches her trembling frame and feels the fizz of confused anger inside her own belly.

" _Bright and early on the twenty-sixth,_ " Yusuf confirms.

A memory emerges from the ink of Ariadne's mind, a hissing, spitting wildcat of an Englishman, half drunk as he barrels into a warehouse sporting a black eye and no luggage.

 _Fucking Danish cunts and their fucking Danish by-laws. What exactly have the Danes ever given us, huh? I'll show them extradited. I'll extradite them all the way to Kingdom Come. The twats. I don't even like Carlsberg. Piss in a barrel._

"Sounds good," Ariadne says. "I'll think about it."

She tries to mask the tremor in her voice with a yawn, but Yusuf's reply is stilted.

" _Grand,_ " he says. " _I'll tell him you'll call, yes?_ "

"Mm," she replies, her breath quick and cold in her chest. "Yeah. Good."

" _Everyone loves the funhouses,_ " Yusuf says, pointed and flippant. " _Use his Spanish number. Take care._ "

"You too, Yusuf," Ariadne says.

The call ends. Her throat is painfully dry.

The dark is descending quickly by now, sunset smouldering along the western skyline. Ariadne tumbles off the sofa and reaches out of her window to pull the shutters closed.

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She tells herself she misunderstood.

She tells herself that just because Eames complained about the Danes and extradition and colourful sailor swears in the same sentence, doesn't mean he's actually unable to return to the country.

Doesn't mean he's lying about the job.

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Doesn't mean Yusuf's lying about the job.

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(Someone's lying about a job.)

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There's another phone call. A shorter one. Two hours after Yusuf's.

Two hours of thinking about what could possibly make Arthur stop returning her calls after over two and a half years of clean jobs and smooth runs. Two hours of thinking about how if anyone could figure out who's lying about the job in Copenhagen, it would be Arthur.

This time, Ariadne types the number, feeling queasy with nerves.

Cobb answers with a light, confident voice.

A father's voice, full to the brim with mirth.

" _This is Dom,_ " he says in that fatherly voice, fresh and wide as the ocean that separates them.

Fuzzy in the background, a thinner voice yelling _Daddy you're not looking!_

"Cobb," she says, can't mask the tremors of guilt and need that hang through the line between them. "It's, it's Ariadne. I'm looking for Arthur. I think something's wrong."

The far away voice continues, a stream of yelps and demands that sound like cartwheels and trampolines.

 _Daddy did you see you aren't watching Daddy watch me look at me look Daddy watch I'm doing it now Daddy watch Daddy watch me!_

And then, Dom speaks again.

" _Sorry?_ "

The word punches a hole in Ariadne's chest, a light lilt of confusion colouring his voice, the impersonal cadence of a stranger.

"It's Ariadne, I've been trying to talk to -"

" _Sorry_ ," Cobb says again, harder this time. " _I think you've got a wrong number._ "

"Cobb!"

He ends the call.

Ariadne can see it in her mind's eye. Dom, throwing down the phone like a rodent, returning to the sunshine glow of his children, watching them dance barefoot in the grass, competing and clowning for his adoring attention.

Ariadne feels her own phone slide out of her hand to the floor with a dull carpeted _thump_.

For the first time since Arthur failed to return her call months ago, the breathless nausea of panic starts clambering up her throat, sticky fingers in her oesophagus, clamping her tongue with talons.

There are so many reasons why Cobb might have ended a call like that.

Inappropriate company, inappropriate time. Tapped phone, bugged house.

Any number of reasons that might suggest he'll call back with a grunted apology and news of Arthur lying low in Kazakhstan.

But Ariadne feels the raw scrape of fear against her insides all the same. She returns to her couch before her rubbery knees can buckle completely, snatches the phone up from the floor and sinks into the cushions.

She curls her feet beneath her, lays her head back to gulp the grey air and waits for Cobb to call her back.

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The first time Arthur doesn't pick up the phone, Ariadne assumes he's busy.

When a week passes by without a return call, she tries again.

(She tries and she tries and she tries.)

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That night, after the phone calls that shouldn't have been answered, when the picture text comes as the clock kisses four AM, she doesn't bother trying to call.

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It happens like this.

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She wakes up at four in the morning, the pitch of night, clouds cloaking the stars. She forgot to shut the curtains and the shutters are still flung wide. Outside Paris sleeps, hesitant.

The television is on, flicking white and blue and red, silent. Adverts, maybe. She can barely see for the glare of the screen in the dark, wincing in her eyes.

In her hand, her phone, silent too, the battery drained to almost nothing.

No missed calls.

But there's a text.

The number isn't one she recognises.

 _1 MB Picture Message,_ it says.

 _Download._

 _Delete._

She clicks the first option, the bloody lump of her heart in her throat, pulsing and pinching. Her breath rattles in her chest, brittle, toxic.

The picture loads slowly.

Splice by splice, a dusty floor is revealed, grey and dark and splashed with something shiny, wet. Red.

The pool of blood leaking around Yusuf's head is not a crude mockery of a halo. He doesn't look like he's sleeping.

One arm is bent and splayed backwards like an unfolded wing of a crippled bird. His shirt is torn, soaked with blood and sweat.

His face, puffed purple and split.

He looks like he's in pain.

A sharp, terrified bellowing echoes out of Ariadne. She slaps a hand over her mouth hard enough to cut her lip on her teeth. Guttural fear clamours and claws and she mentally corrects herself as hot, stinging tears drip fast down her face.

He looks like he died in pain.

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(She doesn't know it, yet. That coincidences, they are so very, very real. That Occam's Razor is a bedtime story.)

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She answers the phone when it rings, even as the battery light blinks in warning on her cell.

"Yes?"

" _You're a difficult woman to reach, Ariadne._ "

For some reason, she's startled by the rolling accent that might be Dutch. A man's, light and disgracefully reasonable sounding.

"You've been sitting outside my apartment long enough," she says and, bolstered by the lack of tremor in her voice, continues. "What do you want with me?"

The man's laughter is cool and pleasant.

Ariadne rubs the tears from her cheeks with hard fingers, tries to keep hold of the measured breaths she's counting in her head like waves on a beach, trying to burn through the image of Yusuf's shattered skull cracked open against the ground.

" _Unfortunately, Ariadne, I have better things to do than sit outside your apartment all day watching you play third wheel to Cinderella and Prince Charming._ "

Ariadne's lungs clamp shut.

Jessie's grinning face bleeds into her thoughts, her blonde hair stained red, her wide mouth and her snubbed nose and her green eyes.

"Don't you fucking dare," she chokes.

Terror is biting her lips, her bones.

Against her will, Ariadne feels her body folding into herself, aching and yearning and desperately afraid.

" _Ariadne,_ " the man warns, a distinct growl tickling his words. " _Listen to me carefully. You're already in a lot of trouble but I am here to get you out of it. There's something I need you to do for me and you are going to do it. It's in everybody's best interests that you do as you're told. Do you understand me?_ "

She tries to answer. She tries to speak but her mind is shutting down, heavy clouds putting a stopper in every thought beyond _Jessie Yusuf Max Jessie Max Yusuf Jessie Yusuf Yusuf Jessie-_

Her knees throb as she scrambles off the couch, tries to drag air in and sound out but it won't come, won't go, nothing works. The phone tumbles out of her grasp and her throat is burning.

There's a voice yelling her name, too loud to be the man on the phone and hands, a hand in her hair, a hand on her knee, pulling and yanking and rage bursting the vessels in her heart. Cobb's voice echoing _Sorry?_ over and over and Ariadne feels the abyss looming before it claims her.

She leaps into it gladly.

The blissful empty swallows her whole.

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It doesn't take long after that.

Screaming she feels but can't hear. Half an hour she doesn't remember, Jessie and Max breaking in as she yells down the whole apartment block.

Jessie cleaning her up after she vomits mid-retelling of the day's events, apologises for her disbelief, begs her to call for help.

Max bellowing at her in rapid French for endangering them in her _shit_ , demanding she call the police before he does it for her.

That's when the car arrives, electric, no engine whir to warn them. It glides silently over the cobbles, sits in wait outside the apartment block. The streets are mostly empty, because dawn is still only a whispered promise.

Ariadne zips up a packed weekend bag, marches past Jessie's wet face and bony fingers.

Max holds her back, bare shoulders against his chest, his forearms braced across her torso. He nods at Ariadne over his girlfriend's shoulder and her heart aches in her shoes.

She gets in the car with an abstract, hopeful fear, sits trembling with mortal rage at this man's doughy smile.

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The drive is long.

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There's a plane, a sleeping pill choked down with lukewarm water. A gun in an unclipped holster .

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 _I am Michel. I'll be escorting you to HQ immediately. Have you eaten?_

Don't you fucking talk to me.

 _Manners are everything, Miss Sommerson, for a person in such a position as yours right now_.

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 _ **(faltering in the hollow, cavernous)**_

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The flight might be long, it might be short.

Either way, she wakes up sweating and allows herself to be dragged across a sunlit compound into a building made of concrete and despair. She sits in the chair they push her into, drinks the still water they open for her.

It's an interrogation room, the kind someone has almost certainly died in ten years ago and the people that frequent it now tell themselves they're better than those that came before them.

It takes a few minutes to recognise Arthur when they thrust the photograph under her nose.

His hair is long, curling in cowlicks around his ears. He's gone from slim to underfed and he's wearing tight jeans with a dark pink polo cutting too close to his throat. But it's more than that.

 _Associating with terrorists_ , they threaten, her own private sentencing.

That's when they pull out the photograph of Arthur.

The word jars as she stares down at the traffic cam photograph of her friend, her mentor and thinks _not you, you are good_.

Twenty-four hours ago, _criminal_ was a bitter pill to choke down.

Now _terrorist_? _Arthur_?

"The prisoner is in our custody," the woman interrogating her says. "You are going to extract the names and locations of his associates."

Ariadne's mouth opens.

"Not your petty dream thieves," the woman sighs, exasperated. "The war-mongering, secret-spilling treasonous animals he sold his own government research to."

Ariadne just looks down at the photograph again, at Arthur's soft, crumpled face.

 _He was a good man,_ she thinks she'll say, when they ask about him. _He was good_.

.

.

Good men, of course, are still capable of great evil.

Sometimes, they lie, they steal, they extract.

(They incept.)

Good men can still drop those that seek to harm them screaming into Limbo, one by one by one.

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"All of them?" Ariadne asks, staring through the glass wall of the viewing platform.

"We got most of them out," the woman, whose name is Grace Rigby, sniffs haughtily. Her blonde-grey plait knotted tight down her spine, her cheeks softer than her eyes.

"Intact?" Ariadne scoffs. She looks down at Arthur's limp body sprawled in the cot below.

Grace Rigby, who talks like a soldier and wears pencil skirt suits and has a thick purple scar on her left forearm, doesn't reply.

.

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Cobb arrives the next morning.

Ariadne hasn't slept more than twenty minutes at a time. It's been two days since an electric car pulled up outside her apartment.

Two days since somebody texted her a picture of Yusuf's bloody corpse.

( _What are you talking about?_ Grace Rigby says impatiently at his name. Brushes away the accusation like dust in the air. She is untouched by callous blows.)

Cobb arrives looking like he hasn't slept for a year, looking almost as bad as he did the day he stepped onto a plane in Sydney not knowing what his fate would be when they touched down on the other side.

He offers Ariadne a weary smile that doesn't even reach both sides of his mouth, let alone his eyes.

Cobb knows why he's here. Ariadne can see it in the apologetic tilt of his head towards her.

That's when the file comes out.

It's an innocuously beige manila folder, fat but not overflowing. A digital copy on a hard drive, too.

"This is everything we have on Carnus," Grace Rigby says coolly, dropping the file on the table.

"Like, Dolos and Carnus?" Cobb asks, hesitant.

"Of course," Grace Rigby replies.

Ariadne's eyebrows rise in polite curiosity.

Cobb laughs, and then Cobb throws up.

.

.

 _Why did you lie on the phone?_

I thought they'd leave you out of it.

 _Why are you lying to me now?_

I don't really know.

.

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Here is everything Ariadne knows about Dolos and Carnus before opening Grace Rigby's folder:

They are pseudonyms of people Grace Rigby does not like.

.

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Here is everything Cobb knows about Dolos and Carnus before opening Grace Rigby's folder:

They are war-mongering whistle-blowers who exposed a lot of dream secrets to the world.

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"They think Arthur was Carnus," Cobb says, holding the folder in both hands like it's a bloody knife waiting for fingerprints.

"And if they're right?" Ariadne prompts; as if there's still a chance they're wrong.

Cobb looks at her, his crystal gaze sharp despite the rings around his eyes. There's betrayal's devastation in his frown.

"Then he's been lying to me since the beginning."

.

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Here is everything Ariadne knows about Arthur before opening the folder:

He is thirty years old.

He wears a lot of primary colours.

He drinks a lot of coffee.

He works harder than anyone she has ever met.

He is mildly allergic to peppermint.

He admires paradoxes and he despises fuck ups.

He was trained in dreamshare by the Cobbs.

He has a viciously sharp memory and very little sense of humour.

His dreams are clean and full of neat lines.

He prefers ex-Soviet cities above all others.

He speaks four languages.

.

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Here is everything Ariadne knows about Arthur that is actually true:

He wears a lot of primary colours.

He works harder than anyone she has ever met.

He admires paradoxes and he despises fuck ups.

He has a viciously sharp memory and very little sense of humour.

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Inside Grace Rigby's file are three possible candidates of Carnus' true identity.

Carnus742G is an Englishman called Owen Perry, deceased.

Carnus928C is an Australian woman called Tess Farley, deceased, in custody, deceased.

Carnus361F is an American man called Jeremy Howard, deceased, in custody.

Arthur's face scowls up at them from Jeremy's file, baby-cheeked aged sixteen. Underneath Carnus361F it reads _Dreamer184G2_.

The evidence is substantial and vague.

A lot of hopefuls and coincidences and assumptions, overwhelming.

"Do you think it's true?" Ariadne asks Cobb.

The scars of disappointment are deep in his expression.

"I think so," he says wretchedly.

.

.

 _He's been lying to me, too_ , Ariadne thinks, feels bad because Arthur's never exactly promised her anything.

She thinks that maybe Cobb isn't just upset on his own behalf. Because if Arthur lied to Cobb then he lied to Mal, too.

 _She was lovely_ , he had said, like he thought a great deal of her.

But he still lied to her face about his own name. He still pretended to learn from her all the things that it turns out the military had taught him first.

.

.

And there's this.

.

.

 _Don't trust Eames._

You trust him.

 _Yes, but if he sells me out to the Somalian government for a tidy profit I am confident I'll be able to get out of it._

Are you joking?

 _A week of sleep deprivation and waterboarding isn't a joke, Ariadne_.

.

.

But then Eames had arrived and Arthur had said things like _you'll take care of that, won't you Eames?_ and it was hard to remember not to trust him when Arthur kept putting eighty percent of the job's success on Eames' shoulders like he knew he could pull it off.

(Like he trusted him to pull it off.)

.

.

Nonetheless, Copenhagen rests heavily on Ariadne's mind.

She doesn't dare mention it to Cobb as they pore over files and mind-map Jeremy Howard's fall from grace. Not when they're in a compound full of earwigs.

After a few days, though, they dig down into the PASIV to trial run their hands at a military base and Ariadne seizes her chance.

"Yusuf's dead," she says, expecting at least a token of surprise.

What she gets is a grimace and a bowed head.

"How do you know?"

"They texted me a photo," she replies hotly, expecting a shade of horror at least.

Once again she's disappointed because Cobb, he just looks _pleased_.

"I was on the phone with him when they got him," he says.

Ariadne feels the bottom of her stomach clench and flip inside her.

"Jesus," she says, and then, emboldened by the ghastly truth, "Do you think Eames has something to do with this?"

"Eames?" Cobb scoffs. "I don't think so. He's a notorious crook, but he actively avoids the military. And he's had a crush on Arthur for years."

Ariadne smiles at that. She wonders if Cobb knows about Somalia and the waterboarding.

"Eames plays his own game," Cobb adds. "But this isn't his style. He's no puppet-master."

It's hard to believe him, though, when he won't look Ariadne in the eye as he says it.

They dream together for six hours underneath, wake up cranky and frustrated, like infants from an ill-timed nap, because all her knowledge of the military comes from films and all of his is out of date.

(At five and a half hours they finally admit to themselves that military camps are the last way for two civilians to trick an ex-soldier.)

Topside again, the file mocks them some more and Grace Rigby watches impatiently through the CCTV camera in the corner of the room.

.

.

 _I think you should call for help_ , Jessie had said. _Anyone. The police. The DGSE. Your dad. My dad. Just somebody. I have a few relatives at Sandhurst. Or, Max knows someone who goes out with someone whose sister is friends with a guy in the Mafia. At least, they think it's the Mafia. It could just be a really dodgy bloke._

But Ariadne had refused, stubbornly digging her heels against the possibility she might actually be out of her depth this time.

 _You friend, Arthur?_ Jessie spat, eventually. _He's a criminal_.

Now it's too easy to imagine looking Jessie in her ocean deep eyes, saying, _My friend, Arthur? He's a terrorist, actually._

.

.

Your friend, Arthur.

The man who taught you paradoxes in Paris and bought you hazelnut ice cream in Los Angeles and fucked you in a hotel in Mumbai because you asked.

Arthur, he is destroying other people's minds to protect himself. To protect a legacy he forged without permission.

.

.

 _ **(while lighthouses, they shine)**_

.

.

 _Ariadne-Joanne_ , her father named her, for a Greek grandmother who never knew of her and a mother who never laid eyes on her.

 _Ari-Jo_ , her friends used to call her in sing-sing voices.

And then there was Casey, who teased her _Joanne_ , with a voice made of cotton and corn. Who fell in love with her with little warning, only to leave with even less.

She lost the Joanne, then. It broke her father's heart to hide her mother's half, but she stopped sharing it. Kept it secret, like her heart.

 _Ariadne Sommerson_ , she says now. It rolls better anyway, the four-three trip off the tongue.

Sometimes she resents it, those syllables Casey stole, along with her confidence and her love. He turned himself into her world, then he turned her world inside out. Exposed the vulnerable flesh beneath the hard shell of her wasted affection.

Casey, who kissed her mouth with a strong tongue and made promises that seemed reasonable at the time but were in fact too much for him to live up to. He stole her name that she had never loved more than when he whispered it.

She fled to Paris in a final bid for freedom.

Found solace and mending in architecture, which had been a dream but became a life.

(Only to become dreams again, quite literally.)

 _Ariadne Sommerson_ , builder of worlds and survivor of Limbo.

The crème de la crème of dreamshare's architects.

(Or so Arthur said, seven months after LA, over Caesar salad and chardonnay in Lyon.)

.

.

 _Do you know what it is to be a lover?_ Mallorie Cobb had asked. _To be half of a whole?_

 _I thought so_ , Ariadne had whispered inside her mouth, behind closed lips. _But I was only half._

Truth be told, she's not entirely sure she ever wants to find out.

.

.

Ariadne was in Paris during the Montreuil riots

Ariadne was in Paris during the pension reform strikes.

Ariadne marched in Paris for everything she could, the way her father had told her she was more than welcome to once she _no longer lived under his roof, thank you very much_ , though his grumbling had never stopped her.

She tied a purple bandana around her head and waved placards and stamped through the streets, a reticent Jessamine Gordon in tow.

 _We are part of something really important_ , she told Jessie, who looked ready to bolt in the opposite direction to the riot police at any minute. _Didn't you ever protest back home?_

 _My grandfather was a Cabinet Minister for Thatcher_ , Jessie had replied, looking ashamed. _I have a cousin who voted for Tony Blair. She hasn't been invited to Christmas since_.

Ariadne's not sure what this means exactly, but Jessie looks like she's about to be struck down from above at any moment for associating with a march and Ariadne thinks, what a shame, that fear of the consequences might inhibit one's politics so radically.

.

.

"What exactly did Dolos and Carnus do?" Ariadne asks on Day Two.

They've slept (barely) and showered (excessively) and eaten (choked down buttered bread). Cobb is slumped in his chair, pulling apart a paper-clipped bundle of Jeremy Howard's school reports.

( _Uncommunicative, sullen, antisocial. Highly intelligent and diligently hard-working._ )

"They sent a lot of emails," Cobb says. "They told a lot of people about what the government and military black ops were up to. They extracted code operations from a low ranking General. They traded with some terrorist cells and they shipped about six government PASIV devices across the globe."

"Why?" she asks.

Cobb looks up, finally. There's a war in his expression between admiration and despair.

"The government didn't start with soldiers using the PASIV," he says. "They perfected lucid dreaming over years of tests. They experimented on –"

The door swings open fast. Grace Rigby enters wearing an innocent expression, two lackeys follow behind with plates of sandwiches and bottles of water.

Cobb looks her square in the eye and smiles with grim defiance.

"They experimented on kids."

Ariadne looks across at Grace Rigby, thinks about Jeremy Howard's file, _Dreamer184G2_ , sixteen years old and studying college level economics and engineering. Grace Rigby looks apathetic at best, unperturbed by the accusation.

"Every test subject was a vetted volunteer," she says dismissively. "How long before you can take the prisoner under?"

.

.

 _You're Ariadne,_ Phillipa Cobb said, the one and only time they met. _Like the spider._

 _Almost,_ Ariadne had laughed. _That was Arachne_.

 _What did Ariadne do?_

 _She saved Jason from the Minotaur's Labyrinth_.

Phillipa cocked her head, curious.

 _Did she kill the Minotaur?_

Ariadne shook her head sadly.

 _No, she just helped him escape the Labyrinth_.

She thinks maybe she could have killed the Minotaur, though, if she had been _that_ Ariadne.

But she's not.

She's _this_ one. The one locked in a compound in what she thinks is Southern France. Yet her prison guard's an Anglo-American woman who barks like a plaited Navy Seal and writes notes by hand like a Renaissance Duchess and Ariadne is starting to feel like she could be anywhere.

There's a big gap missing from her timeline between getting into that electric car and getting out of the plane.

Her totem itches in the lining of her pocket and she's starting to think she's forgotten the true weight of it.

.

.

 _It's your totem. It's the most important thing you will hold in your hand. This is more important than your wedding ring._

I'm not married.

 _I can tell, love._

That's rude.

 _No, it's really not_.

.

.

It seems pointlessly cruel to ask Cobb if he's checked his totem, to show any fear of losing reality when he's barely recovered from his wife's violent disconnect.

She holds off until Day Four, when they're waiting to be told if they're allowed to see the ones that failed to break into Arthur's mind first.

"When did you last check your totem?" she whispers.

Cobb's entire frame seems to tighten beside her. They're sitting side by side in hardback chairs outside an office marked _RIGBY_.

"This morning," he says under his breath. "Why?"

Ariadne can't bring herself to reply.

"Are you having doubts?"

He sounds furious. Reins it into a snort like a bridled horse.

"This is _real_ ," he snaps. "We're awake, goddamnit."

"I'm sorry," she says.

"I know," she says.

"I'm just scared," she says.

.

.

("I don't want this to be real," she doesn't say.)

.

.

Grace Rigby calls them inside.

"You can talk to McPherson," she says looking disgruntled.

She sends them away, her pen twitching against a letter in front of her, all swirls and torn lines.

.

.

McPherson arrives early evening on Day Five.

She's got dark hair and dark eyes and a hundred thousand freckles on her face and hands.

She looks drawn and wilted, like her bones shrank without the rest of her body's permission. She wears soft grey trousers and a black blouse open at her throat, revealing deep scratches in her clavicle.

Her fingernails, Ariadne notes, are cut down to the wick, thick red lines of bruises in their rims.

"There were three of us," she says.

Her accent isn't strong. Edinburgh, Ariadne thinks, if she remembers Jessie's British dialect lessons well enough.

"We built his safe-house in Melbourne, the one we found before we'd caught up with him."

She doesn't sound afraid, though her fingers flinch towards her throat more than once. Her lips wrap bitterly around her words.

"He played along, but he knew. He knew the whole time. One minute he's making coffee and talking to Savage like he's an old school friend. There's music playing and it's raining outside. Savage took one sip of that coffee and went down like a pigeon shot out of the sky."

The words fall out of her lips like the creeping tales of the wolf in the night, softly spoken threats and ill-fated promises.

"I don't know how he got us down," she says, as defensive as if they were another inquisition, like the one she's no doubt been suffering since escaping the claws of a man pumped with sedative and trapped in his own mind. "We were two levels deep but he got us down to a third. I shot myself out of the dream, woke up still in Melbourne. Couldn't find Corrino. Savage, he was just, gone. I was so afraid of dropping to Limbo. I ran.

"He hunted me down like – I don't know. It was a horror film. The city flooded. Like he was trying to smoke me out or something. Flood me out. I ended up stranded on a rooftop with one of his projections. A woman with red hair and – shite."

She breaks off to gulp down air. Her eyes are pink.

"They got Corrino out of Limbo, apparently. Savage is still a vegetable."

She looks up from her bruised fingers. She looks up at those that are to go where she dreads to dream of.

"He's an animal," she spits, slicing cleanly through her anger, into the toxic rage beneath. "He needs to be put down."

.

.

McPherson isn't much help beyond that.

She scratches her blunt fingernails and screams at them to put the beast and all his victims out of their misery; to shoot him in the head.

.

.

They don't ask for another interview.

.

.

Holier-than-thou Grace Rigby just _hmm_ s, looking as determinedly unsurprised as she can.

(She doesn't hide the disappointment as well as she clearly means to, though.)

.

.

 _My imagination works perfectly fine, thank you very much!_ Arthur had shouted across the Paris warehouse, while Yusuf and Cobb were running tests in another room.

Ariadne had looked down at her blueprints awkwardly while Eames laughed and replied in a soft cat's purr, _Your sense of humour still needs work, though._

.

.

Too soon, they go under.

Standing on a viewing platform above, waiting for the signal, she thinks about what she'll say when people ask about Arthur the Point Man.

 _He was good_ , she wants to be able to say.

More accurately, though: _I wish he was good. I think he was good. (It was hard to tell.)_

.

.

"I think we should let him fill the blanks," Cobb says, against every lesson he ever drilled into Ariadne's head.

"You think _what_ now?" she scoffs around a mouthful of tuna mayo sandwich.

"We give him the dream and let his subconscious fill it. All of it. Not just, you know, the bank and the safe and the projections."

"You mean you want to insert us directly into his uninhibited subconscious," Ariadne corrects, not quite laughing, because it's not quite a joke.

.

.

I can't do this.

.

.

This is fucking amoral.

.

.

What if they're wrong?

.

.

What if they're right?

.

.

What happens after we do it?

.

.

What happens after we fail?

.

.

What happens to us after?

.

.

(What happens to _him_?)

.

.

 _ **(outside, under oath, as Perseids reign)**_

.

.

"How did you meet Arthur?" Ariadne asks.

She doesn't bother pussyfooting. It's hard to pretend to be coy with a man whose mind she broke into like a thief in the night. (Like a thief in the elevator shaft.)

"He came to Mal and I when we were researchers. He'd graduated in Biochemistry and was interested in applying his thesis research to lucid dreaming. He got into the off road stuff before us. Before me."

They're sitting at a table near the window. Their pencils are broken and their papers are full.

"He got in with people like Taylor Mason and Bella Neita," Cobb continues, regretful, fully aware he's retelling a history of deceit. "Mal and I did some softball jobs before everything happened. I'd been working on extraction theory for years."

Ariadne reaches over, plucks the pencil stub out of Cobb's fingers.

"How did you find out about Dolos and Carnus?" she presses.

Through the window, they watch a car pull up. Two men in grey crisp suits step out, greeted by a third. They shake hands, self-congratulatory and charming. Above them, the clouds shine white.

"We all heard about them," Cobb says, eyes clumped like a seal. "All the government-funded researchers. One day it was hush hush. Then the next, a bunch of alerts and phone calls redirected from the goddamn Pentagon saying there'd been a security breach."

He laughs across the table, picks up another pencil to twirl it like a spinning top in his hands.

He's aging every day in here. He's mourning a friend that never really existed and he's scrambling for answers he doesn't want.

"All those conspiracies about the government spies? Newspapers saying the US had gone Cold War on us all. People up in arms about the CIA going too far, spies everywhere. People like to protest things they don't understand."

( _We're part of something really important_ , she hears herself insist.)

"That was them?"

Cobb shrugs, wobbling his hand in a half and half motion.

"That was a ripple effect of what they started. They told the researchers and the middle men what the government was up to. How they figured out lucid dreams. How they were using them to forcibly extract intel from prisoners. It trickled down to journalists screaming about governments spying on their people through computer software. Which, to be fair, is mostly true by now.

"The PASIVs and experiments didn't exactly reach the tabloids, else everyone would know about it."

According to the ugly file that sits between them at the table, Arthur is thirty-two years old.

It's only a lie of two years.

But two years holds a lot of time in its hands.

A lot of real clocks and a lifetime of dreams.

.

.

 _How did you guys meet Eames?_

He was an art forger and a fence in Sydney. He was conning a mark Arthur and I were working on. Mal was pregnant with James at the time. He almost lost us the extraction. Ended up buying his way into the job. Arthur was so mad he wouldn't even look at him the whole time.

.

.

Before they go under, Grace Rigby reminds them.

"I want names and I want locations. I want Dolos. You hear me?"

.

.

Cobb has a pep talk of his own prepared.

"Any history between us and him doesn't matter right now. To him, we're the enemy. Understand? We're invading his mind. He is going to hunt us down like McPherson and her team and all the others they sent down. Understand? Whatever you see, whatever you hear, remember that he has successfully conned every single person he's ever met for years. Understand?"

.

.

Before they go under, Ariadne thinks about all the questions she forgot to ask.

.

.

"I think in a past life I helped build the Taj Mahal."

Arthur raises one eyebrow.

The sweat on his face is cooling; the blush in his chest fading.

"You should be so lucky," he replies as he kicks the last corner of the sheet off the bed.

Ariadne turns her head, looks at his profile from across the pillows and pulls a lock of her own hair out from where it's caught in her necklace chain.

"Shit," she groans, rising onto one arm and tugging at the knot.

"Come here," Arthur says with feathered impatience.

He leans over on his elbows, the length of his front tucked along her side. He fiddles at the knot of hair with delicate, determined fingers. Close up, she can see the bare trace of five o'clock shadow over his jaw, dipping into his chin.

His tongue, she realises, presses into his lower lip when he concentrates.

She watches his expression shift and twist, relaxing as her hair comes free. Before he can move away she surges upwards to kiss the corner of his mouth.

He accepts it with a barely-there return, stays up on one arm to look down at her.

"Thank you," she says.

(Blurts it out, ashamed.)

Arthur almost smiles, then. She sees it in the bunch of his cheeks as he tilts his head.

"You shouldn't thank me."

"I asked you," she points out, can't quite hold his unabashed stare. The liquid courage has long been sweated out of her.

Arthur lies down naked the way he stands up suited: sure and unafraid.

"I wouldn't have done it if I didn't want to," he says.

 _That_ she can believe. Ariadne has the distinct impression Arthur's never done anything he didn't want to do.

"Do you even _like_ women?" she asks.

Arthur _does_ smile, then.

It isn't a warm smile, but he doesn't look upset at the question.

"Do you even like men?" he counters, to which she has no definitive reply.

He kisses her. He licks a silent, wet confession out of her mouth.

She doesn't ask again.

She doesn't need to.

(Neither does he.)

.

.

When it happens, slipping down into Arthur's head feels a lot like that kiss.

Guilty, intimate, apologetic; boldly regretful.

.

.

She lies down in a cot next to the motionless Arthur. His hair's too long but he's clean shaven. Ariadne wonders vaguely who's in charge of keeping him from looking like he's been tied down and drugged up for a month. For longer.

Cobb lies on her other side, his face turned away from both of them.

She closes her eyes when she spots Grace Rigby watching, feels the pinprick of the needle and thinks _forgive me._

.

.


	2. PART TWO

**SERIES:** Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient

 **STORY:** Infinite

 _A story about whistle-blowers and war-mongerers. A story about pyrite and cubic zirconia, about Dolos and Carnus._

 _A story about doing a bad thing for good reasons and doing a good things for bad reasons. (Sometimes, they are all the same thing.)_

Hullo! It's been a while since I've posted anything here. Welcome to my series **Cosmic & Earthly, Infinite & Transient**. It's a bit sprawling, has a _lot_ of non-linear narrative chucked in and an abundance of slightly reality-bending spy stuff in it, too. I've rated it M for some pretty nasty themes, including instances of torture and sexual violence, although neither are too graphic in this story.

There is an Arthur/Eames pairing, but it's such a slow burn that the flame is barely alight in this one. You'll see it more in future stories, particularly Arthur and Eames' viewpoints, which will come later in the series. There is also a tiny bit of Arthur/Ariadne, but it's quite obviously not endgame.

I would love to know what you think, so do leave a little review!

Many thanks,

ArwenJaneLilyLyra x

(Cross-posted from Archive of our Own under **LittleRedCosette**.)

.

.

 **PART TWO**

 **(the dream)**

.

.

Ariadne opens her eyes, blinks dry and stinging in the dusty light.

She's alone in a room with a slanted ceiling. An attic, painted lilac about eighty years ago, it seems. The two skylights reveal through smudged glass clear skies of radiant blue.

On the floor, two thin mattresses stacked together, a small pile of books and a cat sleeping in a patch of sun on the hard wooden floor.

Ariadne looks around but sees no way out.

The cat wakes, a lazy flick of tortoiseshell tail.

"Stay there," she tells the cat in a whisper before tugging the mattresses across the floor with a _sshh_ of rustling fabric.

Sure enough, a closed trapdoor presents itself.

She grasps the ring hook at one end and tugs hard. Opens the door expecting similar wood and plaster dust, perhaps a hallway or another room.

But when the trapdoor opens, from it there bursts an almighty scream.

She falls back, gasping.

A multitude of screaming, unleashed like cannon fire, pierces her eardrums.

Men and women, all screaming. Their hands reach for her, dirty fingers with broken nails, they clutch her and pull her and scramble at the open doorway above them.

She tries to slam the door shut but the sound is too great. Their hands and voices are too powerful to be re-silenced. Their pungent, rotten salt stench permeates the ghostly butter sun of the room, a wave so filthy it stains the twilight lilac of the walls.

Above her pounding head the glass from the skylight shatters into blinding shards that sprinkle over her, over the cat that yowls in dismay, leaping to a corner and clawing at the walls.

A litany of curses fall from Ariadne's lips.

In their tumultuous effort to escape, the prisoners below slow each other down, snarling and shrieking for freedom, their faces gaunt and their skin rotting over their flesh.

Desperate, Ariadne leaps up, catches the rim of the broken skylight, scraping the skin of three fingers.

Hot blood swells up to the surface and drips to the floor.

The frenzy expands.

They smell the blood like caged sharks and Ariadne jumps again, panting breathlessly, once more and once again until her hands firmly grip the frame.

Remnant glass digs hard into her hands as she hoists herself halfway up.

Her head breaks the surface even as her legs dangle dangerously above the floor.

Tears burn in her eyes as glass cuts into the tendons of her hands, her fingers spasm and her grip slides down. Her blood spills to the wood below in heavy, thunder-rain drips.

"No!" she bellows, holds tight and heaves.

The screaming is ringing out around her, into the sky above. She can see bronze and pearl clouds streaking along a horizon of farmlands, scorching yellow rapeseed and silky lavender like the South of France in one clean snapshot.

"Please, please, please," she jabbers as her arms shake with bloody effort.

Red is dripping to the floor below and the screaming peaks. She can taste the salt of her desperation trickling from her top lip into her open, pleading mouth.

Two hands grab her left ankle.

With a fierce kick she lashes at her attacker but the hands hold firm. Two more take her knee, three more grab her right shin.

They pull her down and the glass hits the centre of her palm, carving deep grooves into the thin bones of her hands. She falls back down into the swollen attic. She's cushioned by her attackers, they claw at her limbs and for a moment she is paralysed, petrified.

But the scrambling escapees aren't interested in harming her.

She is only a step to push up from as they lunge towards the light, sun-starved vampires close to dissolution. She's winded by feet trampling her; she covers her face with her forearms as blood pours from her shaking, shredded hands and a sound she's never heard before rips itself from her lungs.

As soon as a gap in the forest of legs reveals itself, she scrabbles out of the surge.

The cat has vanished.

Most of the light has been blocked by the ragged bodies as they clamber, sobbing and grunting, up onto the roof.

She glances at the trapdoor.

The first wave had been the strongest. The stragglers that are still heaving themselves up into the attic have been exhausted into sluggish, faltering movements. The last one, a boy in his early teens with a ratty face and a dirty mop of blond hair, drags his legs out of the hole with the bony strength of his hands alone.

Cautiously, Ariadne shuffles to the trapdoor.

She hears a rushing sound that had been swallowed by the prisoners' screaming.

Looks down, but it's utterly dark.

Feels lightheaded as blood continues to pool in her hands. The gouge marks in her palms are very deep. Her thumbs feel dislocated.

"It's a dream," she whispers, tucks her elbow against her blue hoodie to feel her totem in the lining. "Just a dream," she promises herself.

Swinging her legs over the edge of the trapdoor, Ariadne takes a deep breath and drops into the inky dark of Arthur's subconscious below.

.

.

 _You pulled us into this chaos._

 _You did this._

 _Now, we are all in danger. Your danger. If one hair on Jessie's head is harmed, I will kill you._

 _Do you understand me? You will be dead._

.

.

 _ **(like cubic zirconia, it is not precious)**_

.

.

She lands in water.

Not deep.

Ice cold.

It reaches her knees, soaking her shoes and her jeans.

The current tugs at her softly to the left, so to the left she walks. And as she walks, tentative, no sense of place to guide her but the flow of the brook, she can't recall wet feet pressing down on her as the escaped projections stampeded.

Which means this dark she leapt into is not the dark they were so viciously desperate to escape.

However mild a comfort that might be, she clings to it as she draws her bleeding hands into her abdomen.

The cold is congealing the blood flow, but the sting brings tears to her eyes. She blows on her palms and shakes.

"I can help with that," a voice startles her.

"What?" she calls out blindly into the gloom, stopping in her tracks to scan the pitch direction from which the voice came.

"I said," the voice mumbles. "I can help."

Abruptly, a light flickers on.

It's a naked bulb, swinging from a surprising high ceiling of glittering wet stone.

"Who –" she starts, pulls up short at the sight of an old man standing on a small rowing boat only a few metres away.

As she looks, more light bulbs flicker on, dark yellow, casting mistrustful shadows, revealing what appears to be a vast underground lake.

"Who are you?" she asks, taking a step closer.

The old man just scoffs at her, holding out an oar for her to grab.

"Get in," he says gruffly.

His wizened face twists with disapproval as she gets blood on his oar, holding tight and clenching her teeth against the pain.

She walks to the boat, smearing blood along the wood until he takes her arm and hoists her in.

The oar is quickly dropped with a _clunk_ as the old man pushes on her shoulders until she sits.

"Foolish girl," he says. "Whoever taught you to go up when looking for secrets?"

He sounds disappointed, shaking his head and ripping up an old Soviet flag into strips.

"Here," he grunts, wrapping the first strip around her right hand roughly. "You go down for secrets," he reprimands her. "You go deep."

The boat, she realises, is drifting across the water, perpendicular to the current she had felt beneath the surface.

"Understand?" he asks. His accent is tilted towards Eastern European, but for three brief syllables she hears Max instead, livid, his arms wrapped tight around his girlfriend as she cries.

Ariadne scans the features of the man's face.

His wrinkled skin is bunched tight at his eyes, which are dark brown, as he scrutinises her right back.

What little hair he has is white; his limbs are long and wiry.

"You're his grandfather," she says abruptly, without really knowing why.

The old man grunts noncommittally.

"I am the Boatman," he sneers, moving on to her left hand. "You cut these deep," he marvels with disdain. "You'll need to make sure you don't bleed out. She won't be if happy if you come back empty handed."

He ties the last knot at the back of her hand.

"What do you mean?" she asks, even though it's perfectly _obvious_ what he means.

And if this grizzly old Boatman knows who sent her down to dig up secrets, then _Arthur_ knows.

(Then Arthur is coming for her already.)

Before she can decide if that's good or bad, the Boatman raises both hands and shoves her in one hard push.

She topples backwards over the lip of the boat, shrieking. Her limbs flail, her cry of surprise upturns like a barn owl's screech.

Before she can register the fall, her body plunges into the perishing cold of the underground lake.

.

.

It's deep, here. Cold.

The water is deep and aggressively cold. There is no light to guide her.

Ariadne kicks her legs and swallows the viscous water.

.

.

(It tastes of pepper and honey.)

.

.

A hand pulls her up. As Ariadne raises her head, her hands and knees find solid purchase on thick grass.

She gulps clean air as a hand pats between her shoulders. Gipping and yelping, she barely manages to keep from throwing up.

Ariadne closes her eyes and sits back onto her heels. She can feel the sun on her face.

"You're ok. You're ok. You're –shit, what the hell happened?"

She's completely dry. Dry and warm as that cat in the attic had been.

She opens her eyes as Cobb takes her hands, kneeling in front of her to peer down at the soiled crimson rags covering her palms.

"Mishap with a window," she rasps.

Cobb lifts one edge of bandage delicately.

"Shit, that's deep."

"Sore, too," Ariadne grumbles. "Have you seen him?"

"Arthur?" Cobb says, then shakes his head. "No sign of him. Never really thought his head would be quite so," he says, then shudders without finishing.

"What about the Boatman?" Ariadne presses.

"I met a guy in a boat," Cobb replies cagily. "And I have no intention of getting in a boat again."

Ariadne frowns at that, wonders why the Boatman was helpful to her.

(Helpful and then a little cruel, perhaps. But helpful nonetheless.)

"Where are we?" she wonders aloud, turning her gaze outwards.

"Somewhere mountainous," Cobb says, jutting his jaw. "New Zealand, maybe?"

Behind them mountains range, towering and spreading like hunched giants.

"There's a house," Cobb points to the left, towards a tiny cottage surrounded by greenery.

The stone is old and sand-coloured.

They stand together and make their way towards it slowly.

Cobb's walking stiffly, hips low and torso tense. Feeling bruises along her midriff deepen by the second, Ariadne wonders if Cobb was used as a personal stepladder by a stampede of projections, too.

Cobb seems unnerved, more so even than Ariadne feels. She wonders what happened to him with the Boatman, where he woke up and if he's seen something he didn't want to.

She opens her mouth to ask but they close the distance to the cottage too soon.

Above the door, a carving in the keystone reads:

 _In this place, Ethel wed Bertie_

 _1893_

The windows are covered by netting, the plant pots are humming with invisible bees.

The door is slightly ajar.

There's a gun in Cobb's hand, finger creeping towards to the trigger as he toes his way into the hallway.

Ariadne follows, cautious and deadly. Between blinks, she feels a gun tucked into the back of her jeans.

( _I feel like a fucking gangster_ , she'd said. Eames had laughed and slapped her backside, a thoughtless tap that left her feeling pitifully disgruntled.)

Pulling the gun up out of her waistband, Ariadne tests the weight of it in her sore fingers. The ache is duller now, the wounds scarred over, tender as bone bruises. She follows Cobb into the cottage, into the sweetcorn yellow hallway and the dusty lampshades hanging from the ceiling.

Cobb tilts his head towards the first door on the right.

His eyes say _stay behind me_ as he glances back over his shoulder.

Ariadne ducks beneath his arm and pushes the scuffed white door cut into the wall.

"What are you-" Cobb hisses, but they are already inside the room.

Pastel shades of peach and blue line the walls, netted curtains heavy with dust over the windows and a fireplace sizzling with the embers of hot ash. A dressing table sits near the window, heavy dark wood, its surface littered with sooty tissues and a fruit basket full of tangerines and bananas.

Next to the dying fire, a plastic chair.

Sitting in it, Arthur.

His elbows are on his knees and his head is bowed but it is unmistakably Arthur.

When he looks up, his face is devastatingly young. His hair is slicked back, recently rushed into place by hurried hands. He's wearing a cotton red shirt and dark slacks. His feet are bare, tanned.

He looks directly up at Ariadne, looks her right in the eye.

Looks at her like she's the rotten slime of a corpse.

"Are you completely incapable of remorse?" he asks. His voice is hoarse, brimming with brittle poison.

He sits up, surveying her with such unprecedented disgust that Ariadne feels her feet shuffle away, her back knocking into Cobb's front as they stand together, breathless with guilt.

"Arthur," she says. "I-"

Arthur just shakes his head, his lips curling.

"I'm pretty sure the world has a way of punishing arrogance like yours," he sneers.

"You don't understand," Cobb says.

(If Cobb was the pleading type, Ariadne thinks, this is what it would sound like.)

She wants to curse him, wants to stamp on his foot to make him _shut the hell up_. Arthur gets there first, though. He opens his mouth and laughs, dirty and dark.

"Do you even know what guilt feels like?" Shakes his head again, like he knows they don't, which isn't fair not fair at all, not to Cobb, not even to _her_ because - "It feels like your organs are rotting inside you," Arthur continues.

His sneer weakens to something wetter, something sadder. His eyes, she realises, are shining with tears.

"I'm so sorry," she says despite herself as Arthur bows his head again, the heels of his hands digging into his eyes and rubbing hard.

A sob chokes out of his chest, muffled by his arms.

She reaches for him, terrified of this hurt she doesn't understand, doesn't want to understand, but she must, she _needs_ to know.

"Well, I do," he says.

Ariadne stops short at that, just as Cobb's hands grab her upper arms tight. Arthur looks up at them. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve and his expression hardens.

"And I can't just ignore it. This isn't going to go away."

He's looking right through them, Ariadne realises. Cobb must notice at the same moment as she does, because when she turns her head back to the empty space behind them, he does, too.

"Arthur, do you know who we are?"

Arthur lets out a bark of anguish.

"I want to help!" he shouts. "And I want you to help me."

He can't see them at all, she realises, and though Ariadne and Cobb stand silent, Arthur shakes his hands like he's about to be interrupted.

"We did this. Don't you see that?" he says.

He stands up, steps forward once then thinks the better of it. He turns back to the fire to glare at it, as if to fall straight into the scorch of the ash in the grate.

"We told them that experimenting in the dream was a good idea," he says. "We let them think they could control it."

Behind her, Ariadne feels Cobb's edges tighten. She feels his breath stutter to holding and she hears the creak of his bones inside him, yearning.

"We knew something like this would happen and all we did was pat them on the back with a thumbs up and a good luck."

Arthur turns his head halfway, so that the profile of his face is lit cold by the window. He stands like a man looking into the earthworm dark of his own grave.

"Mallorie is dead, Alex," he says and the words are so sharp in Cobb's heart that Ariadne feels their shards pierce her own. But Arthur, unaware of his audience, isn't finished. "She's dead. And you might not give a crap, but I do. Because she was my friend, so I'm going to the funeral. I'm going to help Cobb avoid getting locked up for the rest of his life."

He looks at them, at this invisible _Alex_ , with the kind of defiance that Ariadne thinks maybe she's only ever aspired to. He looks at them, at _Alex_ , like he's facing down a lion without a care for victory.

There are tears in his red eyes and his shirt is creased. He stalks out of the room, past his uninvited visitors, leaving the room flickering with the electricity of his ire and the fumbling flames licking the bottom of the fireplace.

After a moment, Ariadne walks towards the now empty chair, half expecting Arthur to reappear in it.

When she finally dares to look up at Cobb, she sees his pain and feels a phantom guilt, a latent one that is redundant now.

"Who was he talking to?" she asks, because there's no sense in asking Cobb if he's ok. (Dominick Cobb hasn't been ok in a long time.) "Who's Alex?" she clarifies.

"I don't…" he starts but can't finish.

He has never sounded so defeated. Not when he spoke about Mal with such care, not when he confessed to his part in her death. Not even when he realised the depth of Arthur's deceit.

"Who else were you working with?" Ariadne asks instead, taking a seat in the plastic chair like she might absorb some of Arthur's secrets through imitation.

Cobb walks slowly to the dresser, picks up a tangerine and dimples it with his fingers.

"There weren't many of us." His voice is soft, almost fond, the same way he talks about how long Phillipa's hair is and how irritating James' cartoons are. "There was a friend of Mal's from college, her name was Alexis."

He confesses it reluctantly, the name pulled from his mouth like a tooth from the root.

Ariadne latches onto it, pliers and need.

"It must be her, right?"

Cobb shrugs, glances at her shoulder and back to the tangerine.

"It doesn't make sense," he insists, drops the fruit and crosses his arms over his chest. "Arthur's fluent in French. He used to talk to Mal and Alexis in French all the time. Pissed me off. Why would he have a private conversation with her in English?"

It sounds desperate and hopeful, as if Cobb can justify Arthur out of apparently knowing more about the risks the Cobbs were taking than he let on to.

Without meaning to, Ariadne thinks about Max again. She thinks about the way he held Jessie's shoulders tight, shouted at her across the room in defensive, broken English before slipping easily into raw, rabid French, because it was what he knew, because it had everything he needed.

"Well, just because he's remembered it in English, isn't that natural?"

She glances at the door as if she expects Arthur to walk back in.

"It just doesn't feel right," Cobb snaps uncomfortably. "Alexis was _heart_ broken when Mal died. She blamed me. Did her utmost to get me thrown in jail."

Ariadne makes a reluctant, discomfited sound.

"Well, whoever Arthur was talking to, didn't seem to have a problem with you going to prison," she points out apologetically.

Cobb snorts, though it's the clear the old wound twinges at the way he avoids her gaze.

"It still doesn't feel right," he grumbles.

Her patience evaporates, even as the last of the fire in the grate cinches to thick trickles of smoke.

"None of this feels right, Cobb," she says, harsh consonants and burning vowels on her tongue.

He looks at her with an apology of his own. It's weak and disbelieving.

"Yeah," he says. "None of this is right," he agrees.

He walks out of the room, deeper into the cottage. Ariadne tries to pretend it all means the same thing.

.

.

(It's not the same thing, not at all, not ever.)

.

.

 _ **(it wasn't gold, I am a fool)**_

.

.

The cottage is loved and barren.

It is the husk of a home long since evacuated, decaying from the foundations upwards.

If this were not a dream, Ariadne would think it full of ghosts.

But this is a dream, so instead, Ariadne _knows_ it is full of ghosts.

They are invisible ghosts, though. They are harmless ghosts, at least to these two intruders.

They stalk the rooms together, each one as Spartan as the next.

On a table in the bedroom, a thick gold wedding ring. In a closet, a broom and a sickle and a Winchester rifle posing neatly against a rack of winter coats full of mothballs.

"There's nothing here," Cobb despairs, ravaged with frustration.

(Not even Arthur's memory has lingered. Played out like an orchestra, the last legato of strings long faded.)

"There's always something," Ariadne retorts coolly. "This is Arthur. He wouldn't lead us here without purpose."

"You think he led us here?" Cobb spits.

Ariadne forgives him for his rough edges. It's unpleasant to think that Arthur would _want_ Cobb to witness that argument, even one lonely half of it.

"I think if he's going to trust anyone to help get him out of this, it's us," she explains, tries for reasonable but comes up patronising.

"You think _that_ ' _s_ what we're doing? Helping him _get out_ of this?" Cobb barks, following her back into the pastel room with the dead hearth and the soft tangerines.

She plants her hands on her hips, trying her best not to feel like an obstinate child.

"Those people up there?" He grabs her shoulder hard, spins her dizzy to face him. "They threatened my _children_ ," he snarls. His nose a scant inch from hers, his eyes narrow and his mouth wide. "Because of Arthur, my kids are alone _again_. I don't owe Arthur anything."

"Don't you?" Ariadne asks quietly.

Stricken, Cobb pulls back and Ariadne follows.

It's true, what he thinks she means. But she's not talking about Arthur answering Cobb's crazed beck and call around the globe as he hunted for redemption like a displaced wild dog.

"If they're right, if he is Carnus, if he did this," she says. "Then the only reason you found out the truth about what the government was up to, what it was capable of in the name of science, is because of Arthur."

Cobb stares angrily out of the window, squints like he's peering through the dusty net curtains, trying to see beyond into the plush cemetery of Arthur's subconscious.

"You do owe him, Cobb," Ariadne presses. "Without Carnus, without whoever his partner was. Without them you might still be working for murderers and torturers."

Cobb smirks, like she's the most naïve creature in the world.

"And what exactly are we doing now?" he says, wan and brittle,with his crystal blue eyes and his California tan. "Other than working for murderers and torturers?"

Before she can reply he looks back at her. He seems taller when he's being righteous, she notices, not for the first time.

"You're right," he says, words torn by an incurable pain. "But I can't repay that debt right now. My kids need me to come home. So I have to give them something."

With that, he walks back out into the grassy, hummingbird sunshine.

.

.

(Later, when Grace Rigby gives her a glass of orange juice and a biscuit, like she's woken up early from a nap in Kindergarten, she'll wonder what Cobb said to them, what he dared unleash amidst his fury and regret.)

.

.

Ariadne returns to the bedroom in the back of the cottage.

The table next to the bed has one leg shorter than the rest. There's a thick layer of dust covering the table, a glint of gold in the centre.

She picks up the ring, smears the dust from the outer rim. It's a thick band, a woman's she thinks as she rolls it in her palm. On the inside, an engraved eternity sign.

The bed is an iron frame and a sheetless mattress. In one wall, a high window of glass stained bloody with the crucifixion. On the other side, a Klimt painting faded with sunshine and a tall closet door painted crème.

"Don't be reckless," Ariadne says aloud, unsure if she's speaking to herself, the absent Cobb or the elusive Arthur.

.

.

She opens the closet.

Steps inside and closes the door behind her.

.

.

 _Your mind closes doors for you_ , he explained, once. _But it leaves signposts. You can't remove them. They're markers for your own sanity_.

 _Then what can we do?_ she asked.

He smiled, sly and raw.

 _You can change the signposts._

.

.

Inside the closet, water drips into a puddle. She listens to the splash and breathes in the air; smells candle smoke and damp plywood.

She listens to the drip of water. She listens to the muffled voice of Arthur, yelling from behind the coats hanging from the rack in front of her.

 _"_ _You do not get to do that to me! We are a partnership. Not a dictatorship. This is not a classroom and you are not in charge. When I tell you to stand down, you do it, because it means there is a problem. It means you're in danger. I'm not fucking around, ok? You're not in charge anymore! I'm not a kid you can boss around. I don't need you to protect me. I need you to listen to me."_

The water swells, pooling at her feet. She holds her breath, feels Arthur's rage and counts to twelve but the water doesn't rise any further. It swills one inch deep, splashing.

Behind her, the door opens with a groan.

Light pours in, clean heat and the heavy scent of cut grass.

"What in the name of Christ are you doing?" a soft, southern voice asks.

Ariadne spins fast, almost topples.

In front of her, a tall man with dirty gold hair and bright green eyes.

"I'm looking for Dolos," she says, anxious and breathless.

The man smiles. He's handsome in a gentle, plain kind of way. He reminds her of movies in black and white, navy uniforms and squeaky clean shoes that tap along the pavement when the trombone rattles a wavering melody.

"Well, he isn't here," he replies, backing away from the door and into a kitchen, arms spread as if to say, _see for yourself_.

It's gas oven hot in here, bubbling with warmth and light and there's a row of herbs in pots on the windowsill.

The man strolls to the fridge, pulls out two beer bottles.

They clink loudly together, hiss and clack when he opens their tops with his teeth. She takes the one he offers.

He smiles around the bottle as he sips, full of pride and savage delight. He drinks until the bottle is empty. Raises his thick eyebrows, but Ariadne does not take a courtesy sip.

"Don't you trust me?" the man asks.

Ariadne shakes her head.

"Good girl," he says, the same way her father said it when she was six years old and on her first horse ride.

(Her last, too, by all accounts.)

She looks around the kitchen, takes in the French prints and recipe books littered across the worktops.

"I'm looking for Dolos," she says again.

"So you said. Have a drink," he suggests.

"Arthur told me about the dangers of telling a dreamer they're asleep," she says. The man cocks his blond head side to side, a lion considering the antelope's plea. "But that's not going to matter if the dreamer already knows."

The man grins. His teeth are too white, his skin too golden.

"They've had him under on and off for what, a month?" She counts it over in her head, takes on step forward but the stranger holds his ground. "One level, sometimes two. He made it three at least once."

Her own calculations are overtaking her words as the magnitude spreads between them in this homely kitchen, like all the oceans of the world have swollen into one tumultuous wave.

"He's had months already. Maybe years by now. Playing hide and seek with the agents they send under to extract from him."

The man fetches himself another beer. Ariadne tries not to be offended that he feels not in the least bit concerned about turning his back on her.

"Have a drink," is all he says before cracking another bottle top with his teeth. He spits the metal cap onto the floor and a chip of tooth goes with it. He doesn't seem to notice.

"He's been prepared for this," she realises out loud and awed, staring down at the bite of tooth, then up at that lean, handsome face she doesn't know. "Ever since he leaked those files from the military, he's been preparing for the day they catch him. Rigby's agents never stood a chance."

The man laughs at that. It's a harsh, throaty laugh. There's no warmth to it, here where everything is warm and good. There's a purple split in his lower lip that she doesn't remember being there before.

He opens his mouth wide enough to tease a drop of blood from the cut and says,

"He scored excellently in all the tests. He was such a smart boy. Utterly charmless, even by the time they made him a soldier. Not even the uniform endeared him."

As he speaks, a bruise flowers in his cheekbone, swelling into his left eye.

"Poor little Jeremy Howard was killed in action on a covert operation in Iran," he continues, looking mournful.

He throws his hands up in the air impatiently, beer slopping out of the bottle. It lands on the flagstones with a wet splat and he smears it across the floor with one foot. He barks through a laugh,

"I helped bury the son of a bitch. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Instead I gave him a burner phone with my number in it and toasted his farewell with the last of my Dalmore."

Behind them, the pans on the stove bubble and hiss.

She can't smell them. Everything smells of spring cut lawns. The strangeness of the dream is not for her. There's no Arthur to notice it.

Wary, Ariadne steps forwards.

"What happened, that made him leave?" Ariadne asks.

The man laughs his jackal laugh again.

"I'm sure you'll see," he says wryly. "It was up to his _partner_ to identify the body, you know. The report says the higher ups tried to persuade him otherwise, but the partner stuck to his story. Even under duress."

Purple finger marks slowly spread along his throat.

"You," she says, softly.

He inclines his head in a weak bow of approval. A cut grooves into his forehead, at his hairline.

"Sergeant Brandon Osmond, at your service, ma'am," he says, a stronger twang of Louisiana in his tone.

"He's not that sentimental," she scoffs, disbelieving and needy.

Brandon shrugs.

"How would you know?" he taunts in reply.

(She _wouldn't_. That's the truth of it.)

Blood seeps down into his mouth from his nose, dark and thin.

"He makes up what happened to me in his head," Brandon continues, licking the blood from his neat cupid's bow as another stream of it leaks out of one eye. "All he actually knows is I helped get him out, the military declared him dead and a few days later so was I."

When he smiles again, one of his front teeth is chipped; the others are pink with blood.

"Have a drink," he says, one more time. "Trust me."

Slowly, bursting a spray of hot blood across the kitchen floor, Brandon Osmond's throat starts to split open, like a knife is teasing it apart, deeper inch by inch.

As the wet rasp of his breath spills into the kitchen, Ariadne closes her eyes and downs her beer fast, like biting the poisoned apple.

.

.

( _Joanne, Joanne, my Joanne,_ Casey used to whisper into the back of her neck, his fingers stroking down her belly, sliding into her underwear with soft confidence, rocking her back into himself with enough force to make her feel more wanted than she thought possible. _My Jo,_ he'd say and she believed him.)

.

.

 _ **(pretending, a kind of wisdom)**_

.

.

The beer bottle drops from her hands even as the last trickle fizzles on her tongue.

She feels her legs give way and the fall takes an age. A lifetime of blinking sunlight passes by her as she drops to the ground, slow motion, like she's falling through the ocean to the centre of the earth.

When her knees hit the floor they splash, warm and for a moment she thinks it's Brandon's blood but the ground is soft and the smell of grass is deeper, now.

She opens her eyes on a riverbank.

The muddy water soaks her jeans and she looks across the lazy river idling by to see a house on the other side, burning.

Three storeys of licking flames, the crackles loud as gunshots.

"Took you long enough," a gruff voice says.

The Boatman looks more haggard in the sunlight. He's moved to her side of the river, sitting in his boat looking disgruntled, like he's been waiting for her.

"The other one's a lot more easily led," he says, gesturing for her to get in.

She climbs in, dripping mud into the boat.

The Boatman glowers at it, but says nothing.

"He's a lot more hurt by all this," Ariadne defends Cobb meekly.

The Boatman raises his bushy grey eyebrows.

"And what are you?" he asks shrewdly.

Ariadne looks across the river, the burning house in an untouched field.

"Scared," she says, sounds more like a question. "Curious."

The Boatman nods, like she's answered correctly. He pushes them off the bank with a heave of effort. The river carries them calmly downstream.

"Arthur wants me to know the truth," she says.

"Does he now?" the Boatman asks in a voice for small children and sulky teenagers.

"Where else would you be taking me?" she retorts.

"He wants you to know something, at least."

They sail together peacefully. Ariadne feels a little guilty, wonders where Cobb is that he's been so _easily led_ to.

They leave behind the burning house, pass fields and copses and even a short pier where a young boy is trying to catch fish with his hands.

"Dolos came first," she states with brittle surety. The Boatman, sitting at the rudder behind her, doesn't respond. "Dolos helped Arthur – helped _Jeremy_ become Carnus. Arthur is still in contact with Dolos. Or at least would know where they are."

She listens to the rush of water around her, to the ghost of Casey murmuring in her ear, the ghost of Arthur hissing _We knew what experimenting would do_.

"Dolos and Alex are the same person," she says. "Dolos was Mal's friend?"

Ariadne turns to look back at the Boatman, hoping he might give some indication of whether she was close.

"Fuck!" she cries with a flinch.

The Boatman is gone.

In his place sits Arthur, wearing a soft blue shirt and suit trousers, his tie loose, like it was in Mumbai.

He's looking at her the way he did in Paris, figuring her worth, calculating her ability.

"Arthur," she says, leans over and hugs his shoulders like he might disappear.

He doesn't return the embrace.

She remains close even after letting go. The lines of his frown are deep.

"Will you remember all this when you wake up?" he asks.

Ariadne opens her mouth, but finds she has no reply. Slowly, he takes her hands and uncovers the bandages. The scabs in her palms are thick. They look days old. For the first time, she wonders how much time has passed.

"I need you to remember everything," he says. Ariadne's eyes widen.

"The signposts," she says.

Arthur nods. "I need you to remember every detail, do you understand?"

"Why?" she asks, despite herself.

"Because when they let you go," he says. "Alex will need to know everything."

"Alex is Dolos," she interrupts, eagerly.

Arthur nods again.

"When you wake up, you can tell Rigby whatever you want. Tell her the truth, tell her a bunch of lies, I don't care. Just get home and wait for Alex to find you."

"Alex isn't Mal's friend Alexis, is it?" Ariadne asks.

Arthur sits back, wearing a fond smile. The boat cuts easily through the water, the wood creaking and the water slapping the hull.

"I know I'm asking a lot," Arthur says. "But you were the one to break into my brain."

Ariadne blushes ruefully.

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't be," he dismisses easily. "I'm glad it's you. If this was all on Cobb…" he tails off, guilty. "There are things I never want him to know."

"He saw your argument with Alex," Ariadne says, hushed, confused. "At least, your half. In the cottage."

Arthur's face crumples. He looks briefly ten years younger, disappointed and hurt.

"Damn," he mutters. "God damn. I thought I had it all worked out. I never realised he would be with you."

Ariadne lays a hand on his leg, understanding.

"In your defense, you have been imprisoned and drugged for a long time. Nobody expects you to be perfect."

Except himself, it would seem by the way his shoulders remain slumped. He focuses instead on steering the boat.

A question occurs to Ariadne, sparking her wonder.

"You were forging the Boatman," she points out.

Arthur's smile cracks through a little.

"So I was," he says lightly.

"You can _forge_ ," she says, almost angry she's so impressed.

Arthur shakes his head.

"A lot of people can create illusions. Made up characters are much easier than real people. You don't have anything to compare them to. Even then, you still thought he was a relative of mine."

She recalls her own blankly inexplicable certainty. _You're his grandfather_ , she'd said without logic or permission.

His uncharacteristic modesty leaves her feeling displaced, though.

"It's still impressive," she says, then, "Does Eames know you can do that?"

Something wary shifts in Arthur's face, before loosening into a more carefree grin that's as disorientating as his modesty.

"Who do you think taught me?" he asks.

She doesn't inform him that Eames teaching Arthur anything, or rather, Arthur willingly learning anything from Eames, is about as easy to believe as the idea that Arthur brokered deals with terrorists without there being more to the story.

(She doesn't say it because that comes with a question she's not ready to ask, not yet. Even though she should, she really should ask.)

Their companionship drifts into silence.

Arthur steers and Ariadne watches the countryside about them slowly populate itself.

Occasional farmhouses becomes clusters of buildings. Stray strangers wandering aimlessly become people watching, interacting, reaching out to them.

Arthur ignores them all until finally he eases them towards a jetty, a field of bluebells on one side of the river and in front of them, at the end of the jetty their boat knocks softly against, a beach house sits, waiting.

"Go inside," Arthur tells her.

"Are you coming with me?" she asks as she climbs out of the boat.

Arthur shakes his head.

"I should find Cobb," he says. "Explain to him."

Ariadne nods, feels a pang of jealousy.

"Remember everything," he reminds her sternly. "And don't die until you're ready."

With that glum comfort to guide her, Ariadne turns on her heel and walks up the jetty to the beach house.

It's white and blue, with a roundhouse porch and shutters and a swinging bench where lies a sandy coloured mongrel, sleeping in the shade. The doors are unlocked.

Ariadne enters with her breath held sharp in her throat.

The hallway she finds herself in is lit by weak bulbs. On one wall, a line of photos.

She inspects each one in turn.

A black and white print of a man and woman holding hands in front of an old stone cottage. A Polaroid of a woman with black hair and a very pregnant belly half covered by her arms. It's Mallorie. She's full of starlight and love, laughing with her eyes screwed up tight and her mouth wide open, looking nothing like the shade that had stalked Cobb's subconscious.

The third photo is of a man she doesn't recognise, wearing military green as he smokes a cigarette outside a bar beneath an orange lamppost.

The fourth is a much younger Eames; he's more tanned than she's ever seen him and his hair is much lighter. There's a glass of white wine in his hand and in that millisecond dash of the photograph he looks quiet, youthfully wondrous in a manner the Eames of today has never been. Not that Ariadne has witnessed, at least.

The fifth photo is Brandon Osmond, the way she met him in Arthur's head before the bruises splashed across his body like paint over a canvas. He's cooking barefoot in a kitchen full of herbs and books, holding up a wooden spoon mid-gesture.

It's after this photo she comes to a closed door.

It opens at only the slightest push, begging her to enter. She only looks in from the doorway, though, at a man and woman sitting together on a couch. They're elegantly dressed, holding hands and looking over a fully laid out coffee table at a man in an armchair.

He's sitting comfortably, speaking in a low tone that oozes charm and derision masterfully.

"Let me put it more plainly for you, Mr Howard. Your son is very bright. But he has a hard time making friends, isn't that so?"

The woman interrupts her husband's reply.

"Children are intimidated by those that are smarter than them," she snaps haughtily. "Jeremy can't be blamed for the ignorant bullies who –"

"The way I understand it," the man intercedes snidely, "Jeremy actively rejected every attempt that was made to encourage friendships with his peers."

"He's a good boy," Mr Howard says quietly, defeated, like he knows that's not quite true.

"I'm sure," the man replies, simpering. "He's also precisely the sort of candidate we are looking for to take part in our new programme."

The creak of the stairs from behind pulls Ariadne from whatever the man says next.

A sixteen year old Jeremy Howard, looking less like _Arthur_ than Ariadne has ever seen, is sitting halfway up the stairs, eavesdropping on the conversation with what would look like mild disinterest but for the fire in his eyes.

His hair is light brown, too long. He looks back at her, says, "They'll say yes soon," then scurries upstairs.

Ariadne follows him, fast, dashing up the carpeted stairs to the landing just in time to see him disappear into a room on the left.

She chases after him, pauses in the doorway that has no door, only a metal gate.

It's a prison cell.

In it, sits Jeremy.

He's filled out a little, lost some puppy fat from his cheeks, added some breadth to his shoulders.

He looks a couple of years older, though his eyes have already aged decades. He's been stripped down to his boxers and an undershirt.

He sits on the floor of the cell, looking up at a man standing over him. The man's speaking in a deep, transatlantic tone.

"They're not going to stop. Even if you refuse, even if you martyr yourself refusing to do what they say, they'll pick up where you left off without somebody else."

Jeremy grimaces. There are tears on his face and there's muck in his unkempt hair.

"What am I supposed to do?" he whimpers.

The man crouches to the boy's level, puts a heavy hand on his shoulder.

"You cow to them," he says. " _This time_." His voice hardens as Jeremy's expression contorts with rage. "Then, you beat them at their own game."

"Ariadne?" a voice beside her asks.

Ariadne flinches, turns her head and finds herself staring at a familiar face.

"Eames?" she gasps. His face is dimpled with confusion.

She glances back into the prison cell but it's empty, now. A windowless cage of air and dust. She turns back to find Eames glowering at her like a wounded animal.

He takes her arm in a firm grip and roughly pulls her down the hall, pulls her fast and stumbling into a room where he promptly slams the door behind them both, rounding on her, ready to strike.

"Why are you here?" he demands.

There are less lines around his eyes than she knows, his hair is shorter, lighter; he's slender like she's never known, lacks the playful light in the storm of his eyes. He's wearing a tennis shirt and dark jeans.

Eames has mellowed with age, it would seem, which is astounding because he's always been bristly at best. She'd laugh if he wasn't bare inches from lunging for her. This young man before her is wiry and angry, with splatters of paint on his balled hands that match the ones in the scruff of his beard.

"Arthur sent me," she retorts.

Eames rolls his eyes.

"Arthur has no sense of self-preservation," he mutters darkly, before turning his back on her and returning his attention to a large canvas surrounded by paint sets.

The walls of this room are covered in paintings. She recognises some of them: a Ship she thinks belongs to Turner, Girl with the Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's Alexander. Others are a mystery; an abstract series of yellow lines, a screaming depiction of the crucifixion, a long procession of carriages making its way tediously through a forest. The one Eames is working on is the largest.

"Caravaggio," she says.

He grunts, unimpressed.

"Anyone who's ever googled Baroque knows that."

It's more vicious than she's used to from Eames. The bite is too sharp.

She wonders, briefly, if this really is the Eames of his younger years, or perhaps only Arthur's version of him. She wonders if this chaotic, frightening bulldog is what Arthur sees when he looks at Eames, so different from the sly, purring cat she's always remembered him as.

Past or imagined, this Eames picks up a paintbrush delicately and gets to work.

"Why are _you_ here?" she asks before he can finish mixing the reds.

Eames shoulders ripple with his laugh.

The glance he tosses over his shoulder at her is, if possible, even more dismissive than ignoring her outright might have been.

"What exactly do you think this house is?" he sneers.

Ariadne looks around.

Like the prison cell, this room is windowless, though from the outside the beach house had looked friendly and fresh.

 _You can change the signposts_ , Arthur had said. And it's true, the beach house was the signpost but it had looked at best to be a holiday home, visited once and half remembered. Not a bank, not a prison, not a church. None of the key-holds Arthur had always taught her to look for.

"It's a safe," she says, flinches at Eames' icy laughter.

There's crimson on his paintbrush. His eyes are hollow when he looks back at her.

He paints a bloody line across Judas' mouth, destroying the artwork with a vengeful smear.

"It's a tomb," he corrects her.

The paintbrush drops to the floor and he's abruptly holding something else in its place.

The lighter in his hand takes only the barest graze of his thumb.

The flame sparks upwards, bright and hopeful. He drops it into the cloth that the Caravaggio sits over and the material burns fast, acrid like plastic and crackling like coal. In a _whuff_ of heat the flames consume the painting and Eames watches it peacefully, too close not to be burned.

Ariadne turns and flees, battering through the door as the smoke swells through the room, thick black clogging. It leaks out into the hallway when she bursts through but when she shuts the door behind her, the smoke does not follow. The handle does not heat up and when she presses her ear to the door, she can hear nothing.

She thinks about all the trees that fall in forests, hears them roaring to their end as they hit the solid ground.

Tentatively, holding her clean, clear breath in her chest, she reopens the door ever so slightly.

She leans her head in, feet out-turned ready to run at the first flicker of inconstant light.

The fire has dissipated as quickly as it erupted.

The room is a derelict shell. The paintings are long gone, their frames scorched and the paint melted into piles of toxic waste on the floor.

In the middle of the room, Eames in his tattered jeans and sooty tennis shirt kneels in front of what used to be a Caravaggio. His head is in his hands, fingers pulling at his cropped hair. He cries loudly into his palms, rocking slightly back and forth with the force of it as he runs out of air.

When he falls forwards onto his hands, clutching at the ruins of the painting before him, hands burning in the heat of the melted colours, she closes the door with a whisper of air, the sound of Eames' rising hysteria disappearing behind it.

Ariadne lets out the breath in her chest.

Turning her head, she stares at the row of doorways, the opening to the prison cell, the thin lines of the floorboards. She stares at the closed door at the end of the corridor.

She walks towards it. The ripped bandages tied loosely around her hands are futile, now. The broken skin is scarring over. She pulls them off, lets them drop to the floor one after the other. Her jeans are muddy and dry, her sneakers still damp in the soles. They squeak a little with every step.

There's blood on her shirt and sweat cooling down her back.

She's bone tired, bone terrified. She stops next to a door on her left painted green. There's a knocker, gilded and heavy looking. The number _23_ hammered into the wood.

She leans towards it, hears music that might be Beethoven playing, the crackle of vinyl through the door.

She keeps walking. Another open door on her right.

Cobb's kitchen. This time she peers inside, sees a graceful woman with black hair pulled back into a ponytail, chopping onions and crying. Mallorie.

Arthur stands behind her, looking lost. He stares at the back of her head, willing her to turn around but she doesn't. She cries over the onions and sniffles.

"I'm not angry," she says between hiccoughs.

"Yes you are," Arthur replies.

"No, I'm not," she hisses, irritated. She spins around, the knife still in her hand.

Arthur eyes it warily.

"I am hurt," she says. "I am hurt you didn't trust me. You could have told me."

Arthur just shakes his head.

"You don't understand. I didn't -"

"Go back to Naples, Arthur," Mal dismisses him, returning to her onions. She's pregnant. Heavily so, judging by the protruding of her belly, the stillness of her movements. "Take your secrets with you."

Arthur bows his head, folds his arms protectively across his chest.

"I can't be sorry," he says. "But wish I could be."

"I won't tell Dom," is all she says it return.

Arthur leaves, then. So does Ariadne. She backs out of the door frame and further down the corridor, right to the end, the final door.

It's white, undecorated. There's no handle.

She gives it a push with both hands, softly at first, but it's heavy with reluctance and she has to force it open, her feet sliding squeakily on the wooden floor until finally it's open enough for her to step inside.

There's a boy on his knees. He's a teenager, possibly a youthful twenty-year old, his skin dark, his hair darker. He's trembling as he kneels on the floor, clothes filthy and a gash on his cheek that needs cleaning. There's a PASIV abandoned in the corner and above him stands Arthur, wearing military garb and an expression of utter horror.

There's a gun in his right hand.

Behind him, another man. Grey haired, also military. He's watching Arthur like a hawk over a rat, distrustful and hungry.

"Lieutenant," he says.

The boy on the floor whimpers, mouth fluttering around a prayer while tears drip freely down his face.

Arthur clenches his jaw. There are sleepless rings around his eyes. He's not much older than the boy at his feet, a handful of years separating them. The watchful officer grows impatient.

"Lieutenant, you've extracted the information you need. There's nothing else the asset can give us."

He sounds almost bored, at odds with the fire in his eyes. The hawk testing the rat, hovering close, just to see what he'll do, if he'll bend to the will of the predator.

Arthur doesn't quite tremor, but sweat stains his collar, coats his grey face in a bright sheen of colourless fear.

He lifts the gun, holds it in one hand while the other stays bunched into a fist at his side.

Pulls the trigger once, the bullet driving straight into the back of the boy's head.

The boy crumples to the ground in a sprawl, blood leaking out of him, rapid and thick.

Arthur's gun hand drops to his side. He looks down at the asset with transparent distaste.

The man steps forward, claps him on the back.

"You'll make Sergeant yet, Lieutenant," he says, grimly proud.

Arthur just stares down at the dead boy at his feet, his eyes as lifeless as his victim's.

Ariadne stands frozen to the spot, eyes darting between the three of them. She's backed up against the wall, dizzy and cold.

Arthur looks up at her. He looks her in the eye, devastated.

Lifeless and disbelieving, he's never looked so young.

"SAS sent him to train us," he says.

Ariadne frowns, opens her mouth as Arthur's hand trembles around the weight of the gun as he raises it.

Then he shoots her, and the questions fall away like stones in a landslide.

.

.

 _ **(without which, I am nought)**_

.

.

Ariadne Sommerson met Jessie Gordon on her first day in Paris.

She'd had an anxious, turbulent flight.

Jessie was unbearable, as far as Ariadne was concerned. She was the daughter of an empire of colonialism and trade. She was a rebellious piece of silverware, shining exactly the way her well-to-do parents polished her to, sharpened behind their backs.

She took hard drugs because it made her cool, spoke perfect French because it made her popular, had semi-public sex with the teaching assistant because it made her powerful.

Jessie and Ariadne were roommates from the beginning and for the first few months they bickered as snidely as stepsisters in a fairytale. Then Ariadne's father called to say a box of her things had shown up on the porch, tidbits of leftovers, one final spade of dirt over the grave of her love for Casey Wilde.

She'd burnt six eggs and four slices of toast before Jessie intervened, methodically talking her through the rules of a decent omelette, while Ariadne cried into her jumper sleeves and drank the flowery tea put in front of her.

It wasn't a smooth transition from there, but a tentative truce was reached.

And when Jessie next came home in pieces, her skin clammy and her stomach rolling, rather than stalking out with her tail feathers ruffled, Ariadne made decaf coffee and marmalade toast.

It's easy now. As easy as it used to be impossible.

.

.

Ariadne wakes up ready, just like upon leaving Fischer's mind the very first time.

She opens her eyes without flinching, Arthur's gunshot still bouncing in her ears. She looks at the ceiling, then up to the platform from which she first saw Arthur lying motionless, just as he is now.

She turns to him, to his slack, thin face, then around to Cobb, who's still sleeping. Finally she looks back up to the platform, to Grace Rigby's stern expression. One of guards comes forward to take out her IV line.

She holds out her arm without comment, lets him work, lets him take her arm soothingly to help her to her feet.

By the time she's standing, Cobb is still asleep and Grace Rigby is at the door. She escorts Ariadne to a by-room.

There's a table and cushioned chairs. Grace pushes a glass of orange juice and a plate of biscuits in front of her.

Ariadne sips the juice gratefully and plays with the round edges of the biscuit. Her mind is very quiet.

Grace lays her hands on the table. She looks older than she did when Ariadne went under, as if the waiting has aged her, or as if they've been asleep for a hundred years.

"Tell me what you saw," Grace Rigby says.

Her confidence that Ariadne will not lie is so absolute, Ariadne feels panic inch its way through her every pore.

 _Tell them the truth, tell them a bunch of lies,_ Arthur had said. She remembers that.

"What happened to Brandon Osmond?" Ariadne asks instead.

Grace Rigby doesn't flinch. She doesn't smile and she doesn't scowl. She doesn't even blink.

"He was interrogated for possible leak of intel," she replies coolly. "He was released after we had made sure he was telling us the truth."

Ariadne swallows. Her throat is as dry as the uneaten biscuit in her hands.

"He was killed in action," she says.

Grace Rigby nods, impassive.

"After we released him," she clarifies.

Ariadne can feel hot pain in the nerve endings of her face. She's going to cry soon and she doesn't understand why, not yet.

"Now," Grace continues, though she must sense the clawing of Ariadne's fear. "Tell me what you saw."

 _Arthur has no sense of self-preservation_ , Eames had said.

Grace looks across the table at her and Ariadne feels soft and vulnerable, Peter Rabbit in the vegetable patch, waiting to be picked up and strangled.

"Dolos," she whispers. Her voice is thick. Tears pool in her eyes, as the inexplicable terror aches inside her. "His name is Alex."

.

.

 _When they let you go_ , Arthur had said, so assured.

.

.

That's when she realises.

.

.

"You're not going to kill me," Ariadne says.

Grace Rigby smiles sweetly at her.

The orange juice is gone; she hasn't dared take a bite of the biscuit yet.

"Of course not," Grace says.

.

.

They sit there in that windowless room. A plate of biscuits and a flickering fluorescent light.

Brandon Osmond, killed in action two days after his release from custody.

They don't need to kill her, she realises as she breaks the wretched biscuit into crumbs. They just need to release her to the wolves of dream-share.

The dream thieves will do the rest.

.

.

"His name is Alex. He was SAS. They were in Naples."

.

.

She misses out one thing, though.

.

.

(Who do you think taught me?)

.

.

The panic attack that seizes her conveniently steals her voice right before Grace Rigby starts to hone in on her carefully constructed retelling of a house among green mountains, the nuptials of Ethel and Bertie, a dusty room with tangerines.

It's her second panic attack in a week, but this one doesn't end with Jessie Gordon stroking her feverish head.

It ends with her lying on the thin blanketed bed she's been on every night for the past week, staring listlessly at the ceiling, shuddering every now and again when the chill of remembrance strikes her from within.

She comes to after dark to find Cobb sitting in a chair beside her.

He's got a pad of A4 paper in his lap and a fountain pen in his hand. She watches him doodle around a centre point until he sees she's awake.

"Finally," he says.

She groans, embarrassed.

"Oh god. I'm a Victorian maiden."

Cobb chuffs a laugh, sympathetic.

"You're under a lot of stress," he says politely.

She loathes him a little for it, lets it slide out of shame.

Cobb puts down the pen, scrutinising her carefully.

"This time tomorrow, you'll be home, safe and sound."

It doesn't sound like a lie, but that just means Cobb believes it, not that it's true at all.

"You don't know that," she snaps, pushing herself up into a sitting position. She glances at the notebook in Cobb's lap, sees round eyes and a thin, kissable mouth, wishes she hadn't. She looks back at his grim expression.

"What did you tell them?" she asks.

They don't bother looking at the corner where the camera sits in plain sight.

"The truth," Cobb sights. "About Alex."

Ariadne nods. The slime of relief coats her insides rotten, to know she's not alone in her betrayal. It'll probably look good in their favour, that they gave the same name. She doesn't ask if he meant Mal's friend Alexis, though.

"I'm flying out tomorrow morning," Cobb announces. "They're letting you go then, too."

"Do you even know where we are?" she asks.

Cobb frowns at her.

"Germany," he mutters, sounding more like he's telling her the colour of the sky. Laughter pours out of Ariadne like sunshine in winter, brittle and hurtful and yearning for spring.

"If you don't hear from me," she snickers with a weary shrug as he presses a hand to her shoulder, before walking out of the door.

Alone, glaring up at the security camera in the corner of her prison of a bedroom, Ariadne lies back on her bed.

"I have people that will miss me," she tells the camera.

Her heart thunders, racehorse possessed, even when she finally sleeps.

.

.

Her dreams are unnaturally vivid, mercifully restful.

She wakes up with a pounding headache, mortality thrumming in her veins.

Cobb is long gone, but Grace Rigby greets her at the doorway.

"What are you going to do?" Ariadne asks, because it doesn't matter anymore.

If Grace were to pull out a handgun right now and bury a bullet in her skull, it's not like Ariadne could do anything to stop her.

Grace looks impressed she dared ask.

(Perhaps that's why she tells her.)

"He's too dangerous to be an asset," she says without apology. "We'll track down the other one. They'll be locked up for the rest of their lives."

She makes no promises about the length of their lives.

Ariadne hoists her bag onto her shoulders and walks boldly to the plane that awaits her.

Accepts the sleeping pill offered to her without complaint. She smiles at the man sitting guard over her. He offers her a smile of his own and even gives her an extra pillow for his neck. As he holds it out to her, wordless, she glances at a tattoo on the inside of his wrist.

 _sperenţă_ it says in jet black, looping script.

She goes to sleep, wondering if she'll ever wake up again.

.

.


End file.
